Supplemental: Balls and bowls!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014

An obvious right-wing scam: At long last, we’re prepared to admit it:

We sometimes think the new Salon must be a right-wing scam. It must be an effort to create a new “progressive” politics—a politics which will convince the entire country to vote for Republican candidates.

Surely, the kids can’t be this daft, we say. Hence our conspiracy theory!

Alas! A few of the kids may be this daft—and this disconnected from the country. What can you say about work like this from adorable Joanna Rothkopf?

What can you say about work like that? It made us think about a few of her earlier posts:

Listen to Bryan Cranston narrate an excerpt of “You Have to F**king Eat”
It does not disappoint
JOANNA ROTHKOPF
WEDNESDAY, NOV 12, 2014 03:03 PM EST
Giant new London café will serve literally nothing but cereal
I want to go to there
JOANNA ROTHKOPF
THURSDAY, NOV 6, 2014 12:07 PM EST

Man eating nothing but Olive Garden speaks out: “I have not had one meal that was not just perfect”
Alan Martin explains to Salon why he has eaten more than 100 meals from the Olive Garden in the past six weeks
JOANNA ROTHKOPF
THURSDAY, NOV 6, 2014 11:10 AM EST

People, we aren’t making this up! For this, we sent her to the Sorbonne?

The new Salon has loaded its lineup with young, sex-obsessed female writers. But ow! Despite its own lineup, Salon sometimes goes outside the fold to get even more of the same—from AlterNet, for example:

4 fascinating new things we learned about sex this week
Men now have a cancer-based justification for sleeping with lots of women. Plus! A wild discovery about the penis
KATIE HALPER, ALTERNET
FRIDAY, NOV 14, 2014 06:45 AM EST

In that silly piddle-jumper, Halper explains why snakes have two penises. Silly girl! Sarah Gray beat her to the topic last week:

Huffington Post went down this road almost from day one and appears to be pretty successful. One of my favorite movies continues to be Idiocracy. But at first I thought it was a comedy not a documentary.

I really like Bob's critiques of the political media, but I think that he's off-base here. There's nothing wrong with some frivolous articles by a young writer - no one has to read them, and there's no need for every article to be meaningful or important in some way. One might as well criticize the networks for running sitcoms instead of a C-SPAN-type operation 24 hours a day.

You don’t protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracyIt's been 70 years since we fought a war about freedom. Forced troop worship and compulsory patriotism must end

Not a fan of Salon by any stretch of the imagination, but the thesis - blanket and unquestioned adherence to considering all soldiers and all police officers as heroes diminishes those who actually perform acts of heroism and fails to distinguish unjust and unnecessary causes from those that are noble and deserving of heroism - merits consideration and discussion and not arrant dismissal.

Of the 1190 comments to the article, not a single one from CeceliaMac; yet he/she is compelled to comment here five days later relative to a post in which the blogger only vents his spleen about salon trivia.

It's interesting that, while the headline is saying something that is obviously true, your problem with it is it's lack of subtlety. You have zeroed in on the primary subject (our special needs military) where Salon, awful as it is, actually deserves some credit. But Bob's ever vigilant eye is ever fixed on the slender thread of liberals who take Salon seriously. Even the once useful Thomas Franks is a broken record of conventional progressive wisdom. In the meantime we can expect Bob to stay far away from, say, the ten minute commercial for the Republican Party that is inserted in the CBS Evening News every night. I guess we liberals are just supposed to be better than people who watch such programs.

Related - I came across an archived article by Joseph Epstein in 'The Weekly Standard' (15.March.2004). The title is 'The Perpetual Adolescent', and it addresses, among other things, the trend towards teen themes on the the front page of 'The New York Times'. It dovetails nicely with this post.

The gang who were in the midst of transforming the Middle East by force longing for their fedoras. Some of the "grownups" he mentions are pretty deplorable people.

As if a William Krystal popup shill wasn't enough, one page in and it was obvious the wannabe philosopher was going nowhere. I try, I really do, but once again conservatives just don't have the chops, don't bring anything to the table.

We suggest, for anyone interested in understanding Bob,s mindset, that you take a look at Salon's front page. Notice that there are a wide variety of stories covering a wide variety of topics, some serious, some entertainment-oriented, as one would expect from a business trying to attract customers. Bob, true to form, picks out the oddest one he can find -- it isn't even on the front page as we type this -- and pretends it is typical of the content of the entire publication.

We would say Bob's behavior is becoming "increasingly" odd and dishonest, but that would be Bobism, and besides, he's been pretty odd and dishonest for years. While he shows no signs of getting better, except during periods when he's trying to attract donations, neither can we say he is getting worse. But then, he doesn't need to get any worse.

Without knowing the woman ourselves (after seeing her picture, our loss), we still feel certain that she didn't write a post about animal testicles with the idea of being part of an "effective liberal media." The blurb under her picture says she writes about science, health, and society. Nothing to indicate she is responsible for being part of an "effective liberal media." Yet, a glance through her blog shows she writes more things each week likely to advance a liberal agenda than Bob does in a year. Bob, as is his habit, took the most fluffy things he could find from her output and made it seem thats all she does. Pretty ballsy of him, you might say.

We suggest it is better media criticism than anything Bob has done in years. In fact, we are forced to express gratitude to Bob: were it not for his attacks on Salon, we would not have read through it, and we are actually finding much that is good in this horrible, wretched, awful, no-good site that talks about nothing but piddle and piffle and the testicles of animals.

Salon does help voters decide to vote Republican because they "just can't" with the current perverted progressivism expressed on its pages. I thought it was all just a brain dead form of activism and analysis but the conspiracy theory is interesting.